More than 75 essays trace the development of the literary form from classical examples to contemporary English and American writers.

"A Teachers & Writers Collaborative book."

Seneca -- Plutarch -- Sei Shonagon -- Kenko -- Ou-Yang Hsiu -- Michel de Montaigne -- Abraham Cowley -- Addison & Steele -- Samuel Johnson -- Maria Edgeworth -- Charles Lamb -- William Hazlitt -- Robert Louis Stevenson -- Max Beerbohm -- G.K. Chesterton -- Virginia Woolf -- George Orwell -- Ivan Turgenev -- Lu Hsun -- Junichiro Tanizaki -- Walter Benjamin -- Jorge Luis Borges -- Hubert Butler -- E.M. Cioran -- Roland Barthes -- Natalia Ginzburg -- Carlos Fuentes -- Wole Soyinka -- Sara Suleri -- Henry David Thoreau -- H.L. Mencken -- Robert Benchley -- James Thurber -- F. Scott Fitzgerald -- E.B. White -- M.F.K. Fisher -- Mary McCarthy -- Seymour Krim -- James Baldwin -- Gore Vidal -- Adrienne Rich -- Edward Hoagland -- Wendell Berry -- Joan Didion -- Annie Dillard -- Richard Selzer -- Phillip Lopate -- Scott Russell Sanders -- Gayle Pemberton -- Richard Rodriguez.